Phototherapy and Therapeutic Photography in a Digital Age

Del Loewenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135092481
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The digital age has brought about a world-wide evolution of phototherapy and therapeutic photography. This book provides both a foundation in phototherapy and therapeutic photography and describes the most recent developments.

Phototherapy and Therapeutic Photography in a Digital Age is divided into three sections: In the first, an introduction and overviews from different perspectives; in the second, approaches and contexts, including phototherapy, re-enactment phototherapy, community phototherapy, self-portraiture, family photography. This is followed by a conclusion looking at the future of phototherapy and therapeutic photography in terms of theory, practice and research.

The book is for anyone interested in the therapeutic use of photographs. It will be of particular interest to psychological therapists and especially psychotherapists, counsellors, psychologists and art therapists, as well as photographers and others wishing to explore further the use of photographs therapeutically within their existing practices.

Part I

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Introduction

Theories and approaches

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Chapter 1

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Introducing phototherapy and therapeutic photography in a digital age

Del Loewenthal

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Phototherapy and therapeutic photography

‘What is photography for? Can it change our minds?’ So starts a review (Dalley, 2008) applauding the power of photography in a Parisian exhibition on sustainable developments and environmental issues (The International Prix Pictet Exhibition – Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Oct./Nov., 2008). This book considers whether the therapeutic use of photo graphs could also be powerful in facilitating sustainable personal developments through various professional practices.

Certainly, the cultural importance of photographs has been well located elsewhere (for example Barthes, 1980; Sontag, 1990). Freud used photographs in psychoanalysis in order to caution his over-enthusiastic disciples and to remind them of their task. It is said that he had two photographs on his desk: one, of a patient looking ‘well, hopeful and healthy’ at the commencement of therapy, and the other at the end of therapy looking ‘dejected, depressed and beaten by life’ (Symington, 1986: 25). Freud also encouraged his patients to bring him their dreams. So would it be helpful for them to bring us their photographs?

Importantly, we are now in the digital era where the growth of digital photography, including mini movies and mobile phone cameras, together with the rapid use of photography on social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, ensure that phototherapy and its related practices now present a potentially major opportunity, not just for the older person, who still may have a family album, but as a vital way of engaging with the preferred technology of younger generations.

One impetus for this book was the first International Conference on Phototherapy and Therapeutic Photography to be held outside North America, which took place in Finland (June 2008). Following European Pioneers (see Spence, 1986 and Berman, 1993), much of the subsequent development of phototherapy has taken place in North America (e.g. Judy Weiser, David Krauss and Joel Walker). More recently, however, there have been developments in Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, and there have been further innovations, particularly in Finland, as well as in such countries as Italy, Israel, Germany, Lithuania, Spain, Russia and the Netherlands.

The First International Phototherapy Symposium was held in the United States of America in 1979. Psychologist Judy Weiser, who was involved then, suggests in her book PhotoTherapy Techniques (1999), that photographs can be used as therapeutic tools. She delineates five main techniques:

• the projective process, which is about ‘using photographic images to explore clients' perceptions, values and expectations’ (Weiser, 1999: ix);
• working with self-portraits in order to enable clients to understand the images they make of themselves;
• seeing other perspectives, which enable clients to examine photographs taken of them by others;
• metaphors of self-construction, which is looking at ways of reflecting on photographs taken or collected by the client;
• photo systems, which are ways of reviewing family albums and photo-biographical collections.

Finally, to take her last chapter heading, she argues for phototherapy as promoting healing and personal growth. Indeed, many of the chapters in this book suggest a more humanistic location for many involved with this work, even though an initial primacy is given to projective techniques. However, an important more psychoanalytic rendering is provided by the pioneering work of Linda Berman in Beyond the Smile (1993), whose influence will also be found in these pages.

For readers not familiar with phototherapy and therapeutic photography, I am going to take the unusual step for me of briefly describing my experiences of undertaking some phototherapy workshops at that conference in 2008. I am an academic, analytic psychotherapist and counselling psychologist with an interest in continental philosophy, who previously trained as a humanistic counsellor and subsequently completed a degree in photography. I had also previously turned down the opportunity to use photographs to work on myself as I had felt it to be somewhat unsafe. However, through my interest in continental philosophy, the work of Merleau-Ponty, who gave primacy to perception, comes to mind when discussing phototherapy. He states, ‘our perception ends in objects, and the object once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it which we have had or could have’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 67). He may provide an explanation of how phototherapy works in stating that ‘The present still holds on to the immediate past without positing it as an object, and since the immediate past similarly holds its immediate predecessor, past time is wholly collected up and grasped in the present’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 69).

The first workshop I attended was by Judy Weiser. The photograph I chose, which called to me, was of a wall falling down. Working in our triads, I was amazed how quickly this related to my life at that moment in time. Similarly, other people soon got in touch with what was troubling them in their lives. Judy defined what she originally termed ‘phototherapy’ as the use of photographs within what we would take to be a more traditional counselling/psychotherapy session. (Other approaches seem to be more centred around taking photographs of the client. However, it does get more complicated in that there are those, particularly in North America, although rare, who do ‘phototherapy’ who take photographs of their clients, and there are those who start with ‘therapeutic photography’ and subsequently carry out traditional psychotherapy.) I also found helpful her description of personal snapshots as ‘footprints of the mind’, with any photo potentially continuing stories beyond words. Judy also suggested that we take photos of what is important in our lives, often at an unconscious level, and that in many ways all photographs we take are to some extent also self-portraits.

Family photographs were indeed the topic of another workshop, facilitated by David Krauss, another of the key founders of phototherapy (Krauss and Fryrear, 1983). In this workshop we were asked to bring five family photographs. Once again new thoughts came to me: Why had I not brought in a photo of my father? Why was there not a photo of the whole family? Why was the photo with nobody in it so much more about my relationships with people? Again, participants found this approach very powerful – so many people seemed to be working through horrendous life events through photography. Here, one could see how it was possible to now speak of what could be seen on the faces of a participant's child but could not be spoken of before. Or what it might mean to somebody to really not be in the (family) picture. I was also reminded that I had found it helpful getting family photos and putting them in chronological order and taking them to my own personal therapy – though, importantly for me, this had not been suggested by my therapist.

The third workshop I attended was facilitated by Joel Walker, another of the North American innovators. The title of his paper, ‘The use of ambiguous artistic images for enhancing self-awareness in psychotherapy’ (1986), describes well my experience of the workshop, which usefully encouraged me to project onto a chosen image through my description of what I thought it was saying. A further workshop I attended was on developments in Finland attempting to use phototherapy within psychotherapy. It was co-led by the experienced Finnish trainer and psychotherapist Tarja Koffert. Here one was asked to choose a photograph that dealt with trauma in the attachment relationship. The idea was that one first chose a photo that spoke about attachment and then another that dealt with the experience of trauma with that attachment. I chose a photo of two men and a woman on a park bench with the photographer taking the picture from behind, with the man in the middle putting his arm around the woman on the right, but she, unbeknown to him, was holding the hand of the man on his left. The photograph I chose for trauma was one of a jagged piece of glass. I again entered surprisingly quickly into aspects of my life that I had previously found very problematic, although I was not conscious of these aspects being around for me at the time. However, I did then find it difficult to switch off and move to the next technique. I also found that there was a tendency for participants to talk of themselves as victims, but that our responsibility for the pain and suffering that we may have caused, albeit perhaps as a consequence, and may still be causing others, was not very much in evidence.

This primacy given to autonomy rather than heteronomy and the problematics for our culture of doing this, was the subject of my own paper presented at what was to be the first of three conferences (which have particularly influenced this book): ‘Exploring and developing the personal and the professional as the practice of ethics through photography.’ This is based on an exploration of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas' ideas about what it might mean to put the other first, as opposed to oneself, which is again in contrast to Buber's I/It, I/Thou concept of ethics (Loewenthal, 2011). From these ideas, I have made an examination of well-known photographs as to whether the photographers have put themselves or the photographed first. (I have made use of this matrix in training psychotherapists, photographers and other professional groups in terms of their ethical practice (Loewenthal, 2006, 2008).)

In this conference I and other participants were able to learn of the work done, for example, by Jo Spence who used therapeutic photography in working through her successful fight with breast cancer and her unsuccessful fight with leukaemia (see Chapter 4). Also, the work presented by Rosy Martin appears to have very much influenced develop ments in Finland (see Chapter 6). This re-enactment phototherapy with its performative aspects is, so Rosy suggested, to enable people to break out of the story of the family album, which is seen as being usually edited by others so that it does not challenge their notions of the ideal.

There were over forty papers presented in this first conference and many more at the subsequent conferences at Roehampton, London and again in Turku, Finland (see Appendix for examples of these further developments carried out in phototherapy and therapeutic photography), together with various associated exhibitions in Turku, London and Brighton. This has meant that what is presented in this book has been the result of difficult decisions on what to include.

At the initial workshops I attended it became immediately apparent to me from the way the participants worked with each other both how photographs could be used within the therapeutic hour and also that there were concerns as to the appropriateness of people's motivations for facilitating photogr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Prologue ‘The photograph'1
• Part I Introduction Theories and approaches
• Part II The use of photographs in various practices
• Part III Research and the future
• Index